Blood Ties
by Morgane
Summary: --Blood is thicker than water, stronger than law, more important than everything and you simply don't raise your wand against one of your own over a teenager with a scar on his head-- After the events of OotP, Narcissa muses about family


Blood Ties  
  
**********  
  
TITLE: Blood Ties  
  
AUTHOR: Morgane  
  
EMAIL: salzkartoeffelchen@web.de  
  
DISCLAIMER: Harry Potter doesn't belong to me, but to You-Know-Who. No, not him. Her.   
  
IMPORTANT: I am no native speaker. Everybody who finds some mistakes, is free to keep them =^_^=  
  
NOTES: Well, what can I say? After reading OotP, I felt this urgent drive to deal with Sirius's death by means of fanfiction, but for several reasons I didn't want to do write a story told by one of his closest friends. Being sickly fascinated with his unexpected family background, I finally decided to use Narcissa´s POV, but I have to admit that I still feel a bit insecure about it. Please let me know what you think about it *big puppy eyes*  
  
SUMMARY: "Blood is thicker than water, stronger than law, more important than everything and you simply don't raise your wand against one of your own over a teenager with a scar on his head." After the events of OotP, Narcissa muses about family  
  
********************************************************************************  
  
And there is a love that's inherently given   
  
A kind of blindness offered to deceive   
  
And in that light of forbidden joy   
  
Oh I know I won't receive it  
  
When all we wanted was the dream   
  
To have and to hold that precious little thing   
  
Like every generation yields   
  
The newborn hope unjaded by their years   
  
~ "Wait"/ Sarah MacLachlan  
  
********************************************************************************  
  
Sirius is dead.  
  
She does not know why this comes as such a shock for her, why the image of her sister killing the cousin she hasn't seen for fifteen years is causing her this vague, unexplainable pain, but she is unable to brush it aside, unable to forget about it and therefore spends whole insomnia-plagued nights strolling restlessly around Malfoy Manor, asking herself how it could have ended this way.  
  
It seems strange that of all the things she should worry about right now, it is this question that haunts her nights and robs her of her sleep. Lucius in Azkaban, the press that sneaks around the house day and night for a short glimpse of her, Draco coming home in a few days, Bellatrix, still half unconscious from the Dark Lord's punishment, lying in her bedroom - there are so many things far more qualified to rise this half-forgotten feeling of dread in her, yet it is the vision of her two relatives turning their wands against each other, the image of their oh so similar faces twisted in hatred, which makes her shiver in spite of the warm summer night.   
  
Bellatrix and Sirius.  
  
From the very first minute on when the two of them had met in Grimmauld Place for one of their uncountable family meetings, each had found an unacceptable mirror of all he fought to escape in the other - not only the same shiny black hair, the same intense ebony eyes but also the same arrogance, the same insatiable need to be needed; their every weakness could also be found in the other, but in spite of locking them together, it had made them enemies already at the innocent age of three. For one moment Narcissa can't help but wonder whether they had remembered their childhood vendetta when finding themselves face to face in the Department of Mysteries. Somehow she doubts it, but even if they had, it probably wouldn't have mattered to any of them. Choosing their paths and walking them blindly, damning the consequences and any fool daring to cross them, Bellatrix and Sirius were both far too stubborn in their beliefs to surrender to anybody for a long-forgotten childhood memory. It had been more than a gorgeously ironic coincidence that they had both landed in the dungeons of Azkaban for their faiths, after all.  
  
Narcissa is different, however.  
  
She never had much patience for ideas or the divine, never had the wish to comprehend this terribly confusion about the purity of blood everybody around her was so keen of. As far as she can see - and often she finds herself thinking that her gaze goes far wider than those of the people around her - the world is ruled by tradition, not by justice and all those pretty words from Voldemort´s mouth are barely more than excuses used to justify his followers´ hunger for the apple-flavoured kiss and the fallout. The strongest would survive, not the ones with the purest ancestry, and the only blood she gives a damn about is the one running through the veins of her family.  
  
Of course she never voices such aloud.  
  
One sees through her masquerade though, one is not fooled by her regal appearance or her deceiving coldness. Whenever his chillingly crimson eyes meet her icy blue ones, she can see the hidden laughter in them, the amusement that he alone knows of her nature and that those around them are blind. He never says anything about it, however, never addresses her at all if not strictly necessary. Narcissa is never sent on missions or ordered with a task; she just has to be there.   
  
In the beginning, she had often wondered about this, had wondered how this man who punished the most devoted of his followers with such vicious carelessness, who had left his best-loved Death Eater bleeding before her door just three days ago, could let her live although he knew how little his petty ideals meant to her, but nowadays she believes to understand his reasoning; she is the only one of his followers who sees the world's law as clearly as he himself.   
  
Her rare wintry smile slowly forms itself on Narcissa´s full lips. She knows that many of the Death Eaters, her own husband included, follow the Dark Lord for the sake of power only, closing their eyes before his Muggle heritage, but she does not walk her path blindly; wherever Voldemort originated from, he was strong and this is what had mattered to her when she had offered her flesh to the burning tip of his wand. Let Bella do the believing part, let her manage the emotional, fanatical, all-consuming faith that refuses to see anything she doesn't wish to see, Narcissa had neither had the predisposition, nor the energy, nor the will for this. The only thing she had cared about when receiving the Dark Mark was the fact that the snake-eyed man was strong enough to keep her family safe and this had been enough for her.  
  
Her family...  
  
Bellatrix´s soft whimpering suddenly catches her ears again, but this time, Narcissa picks up her silken nightgown with determination and follows the sound to the huge front bedroom she usually shares with Lucius.  
  
Someone had to look after the family after all.  
  
With silent grace she enters the room and approaches the elegant French bed where Bella lays, relieved at seeing her deeply asleep. Merlin knows that after those three days of screaming, and weeping, and tearing out fistfuls of once beautiful black hair, those terrible three days before a smirking Severus Snape had come by, sent by none other than the Dark Lord himself, to force bottles and bottles of ominous potions into her mouth, Bella is in desperate need of her rest.  
  
Another heart-wrenching whimper escapes the sleeping woman's mouth, and despite herself Narcissa suddenly understands the source of Severus´s amusement. Bellatrix Lestrange's voice baring exactly the level of horror and madness she is so fond of arising in her victims... there is some gorgeous irony in the whole situation even she can't deny.   
  
But then Bella had always been the Dark Lord's darling, always the most beloved of his Death Eaters and therefore the one who could disappoint him most. Perhaps this explains both, him saving her while leaving both their husbands behind and his severe punishment.  
  
It's a sick kind of commitment, but it doesn't strike her as odd, though.  
  
It is the only sort of love she has ever learned.  
  
Hesitantly she reaches out hand and touches her sister's hollow cheek, surprised at the sudden, overwhelming feeling of tenderness rushing over her. Fifteen years in Azkaban have lost Bellatrix her beauty and her casual elegance as well as a grain of her sanity, and seeing the powerful, ruthless elder sister she remembers reduced to this weak, helpless shell of a woman touches some deep core in her that she had thought to have lost a long time ago. Almost reverently she strikes her long graceful fingers down the frightening thin face, feeling how the raw agony pouring off of Bella in waves makes her weak with emotion.  
  
It's so easy to love people if they couldn't defend themselves.  
  
It's even easier to love people who are dead.  
  
The thought brings her back to Sirius and again she is surprised that the knowledge of never again going to see this moronic, trouble-making cousin of hers can hurt this fucking much. They had never been close, after all, had never been comfortable around each other, so why this pain, why this grief?  
  
Deep down inside she knows the answer.  
  
They may have had their differences, their experiences of irritation and perhaps even hatred towards each other, but nonetheless they had been family.  
  
*Family*  
  
She remembers how, in one very seldom moments of reckless clarity, Sirius's shy little brother Regulus had declared it to be the only thing that truly mattered next to money and influence, and although her only response had been a contemptuous glare, she had instinctively comprehend. She was clever, yes, beautiful in a frosty sort of way, no one ever denied that, but those were her only talents; she was no dancer, no painter, no poet and neither was Regulus or any Black she knew. Family and money were their entire world, they were their clan, their nation, their religion, their obsession. Betraying the family meant the fallout, this was the one lesson she was never allowed to forget and even at the age of thirty-two Narcissa could still clearly remember the thunder of her aunt's ever-repeating lessons:  
  
´Be proud of your blood, girl, be proud!´  
  
Yes, pride was all that was asked from her, and proud she had been. Never had she felt any need to associate with those her parents accused to sully her name; the name was older than her, would live beyond her, and the idea of putting her desires above it had absolutely never entered her mind. Narcissa had always known what and who she was going to be. She had always known that she would make her family proud.   
  
Sirius had found the idea laughable, of course, but strangely enough this had never once angered her the way Andromeda´s rebellious acts always managed to infuriate her. In the contrary, with every weakness and every glory her cousin displayed, with his sheer, pure arrogance and his unbreakable belief in his foolish friends, with his violent outbursts in their solemn home and his way of angering everybody by thundering his troublesome questions at the elders, he had often touched something vital in her, awoken a fresh feeling of amusement nobody would have suspected in cold, aloof Narcissa Black. Of course she hadn't told him so, had seldom addressed him at all if not for the witty exchange of hurting insults that had been the only sort of conversations they could ever held for more than three minutes, but she had never despised him for being the way he was the way Bella did.   
  
And now he had got back everything he had ever dished out.   
  
Now he laid cold on some distant floor, killed by one of the two closest blood relative he had left.  
  
Staring down at her sleeping sister, Narcissa feels a tired kind of irritation towards both, the murderer and the victim.  
  
How could you both forget? she finally asks her question into the darkness of the room, this question that wouldn't stop to haunt her. All these endless threads of hatred and love, debt and responsibility, life and death, how could you forget about them? Blood is thicker than water, stronger than law, more important than everything and you simply don't raise your wand against one of your own over a teenager with a scar on his head. It is tradition, not justice, that rules the world and no ties run deeper than blood.   
  
How could you both forget this?  
  
For one moment she thinks that she is going to break down right here on the spot, but then she stands up, brushing it all aside with the strength of a cold heart and leaves the room as silently as she had entered it.  
  
There were so many other things that needed to be handled right now and she would be damned if she didn't see to them. She has always done what she must.   
  
For Survival. To ensure that she and the family would not end.   
  
And Bella's wounds would heal and she would regain the Dark Lord's benevolence like she always had, Lucius would soon escape the walls of Azkaban to return to her, as would Draco and they would be family again.   
  
Only Sirius would never come back.  
  
Strange how much this thought hurts.  
  
******************************************************************************** 


End file.
